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‘You do but pain me when you speak thus,’ said Gerald; ‘you make me think that you are one who, having done some great crime, waits to avenge the penalty he has suffered on the world that inflicted it.’

‘What if you were partly right, boy! Not but I would protest against the word crime, or even fault, as applied to me; still you are near enough to make your guess a good one. I have a debt to pay, and I mean to pay it.’

‘I wish I had never quitted the college.’ said the boy, and the tears rolled heavily down his cheeks.

‘It is not too late to retrace your steps. The cell and the scourge – the fathers know the use of both – will soon condone your offence; and when they have sapped the last drop of manhood out of your nature, you will be all the fitter for your calling.’

With these harsh words, uttered in tones as cruel, the stranger left the room; while Gerald, covering his face with both hands, sobbed as though his heart were breaking.

‘Ah! Gabriel has been talking to him. I knew how it would be,’ muttered old Pippo, as he cast a glance within the room. ‘Poor child! better for him had he left him to die in the Maremma.’

CHAPTER IX. THE ‘COUR’ OF THE ALTIERI

A LONG autumn day was drawing to its close in Rome, and gradually here and there might be seen a few figures stealing listlessly along, or seated in melancholy mood before the shop-doors, trying to catch a momentary breath of air ere the hour of sunset should fall. All the great and noble of the capital had left a month before for the sea-side, or for Albano, or the shady valleys above Lucca. You might walk for days and never meet a carriage. It was a city in complete desolation. The grass sprang up between the stones, and troops of seared leaves, carried from the gardens, littered the empty streets. The palaces were barred up and fastened, the massive doors looking as if they had not opened for centuries. In one alone, throughout the entire city, did any signs of habitation linger, and here a single lamp threw its faint light over a wide courtyard, giving a ghost-like air to the vaulted corridors and dim distances around. All was still and silent within the walls; not a light gleamed from a window, not a sound issued. A solitary figure walked with weary footsteps up and down, stopping at times to listen, as if he heard the noise of one approaching, and then resuming his dreary round again.

As night closed in, a second stranger made his appearance, and timidly halting at the porter’s lodge, asked leave to enter; but the porter had gone to refresh himself at a neighbouring café, and the visitor passed in of his own accord. He was in a friar’s robe, and by his dusty dress and tired look showed that he had had a long journey; indeed, so overcome was he with fatigue that he sat down at once on a stone bench, depositing his heavy bag beside him. The oppressive heat, the fatigue, the silence of the lonesome spot, all combined, composed him to sleep; and poor Fra Luke, for it was he, crossed his arms before him, and snored away manfully.

Astonished by the deep-drawn breathing, the other stranger drew nigh, and, as well as the imperfect light permitted, examined him. He himself was a man of immense stature, and, though bowed and doubled by age, showed the remnant of a powerful frame: his dress was worn and shabby, but in its cut and in the fashion he wore it, bespoke the gentleman. He gazed long and attentively at the sleeping friar, and then approaching, he took up the bag that lay on the bench. It was weighty, and contained money – a considerable sum, too, as the stranger remarked, while he replaced it. The heavy bang of a door at this moment, and the sound of feet, however, recalled him from this contemplation, and at the same time a low whistle was heard, and a voice, in a subdued tone, called out, ‘O’Sullivan!’

‘Here!’ cried the stranger, who was quickly joined by another.

‘I am sorry to have kept you so long, chief,’ said the latter; ‘but he detained me, watching me so closely, too, that I feared to leave the room.’

‘And how is he – better?’

‘Far from it; he seems to be sinking every hour. His irritability is intense; eternally asking who have called to inquire after him – if Boyer had been to ask, if the Cardinal Caraffa had come. In fact, so eagerly set is his mind on these things, I have been obliged to make the coachman drive repeatedly into the courtyard, and by a loud uproar without convey the notion of a press of visitors.’

‘Has he asked after Barra or myself?’ said the chieftain, after a pause.

‘Yes; he said twice, “We must have our old followers up here – to-morrow or the next day.” But his mind is scarcely settled, for he talked of Florence and the duchess, and then went off about the insult of that arrest in France, which preys upon him incessantly.’

‘And why should it not, Kelly? Was there ever such baseness as that of Louis? Take my word for it, there’s a heavy day of reckoning to come to that house yet for this iniquity. It’s a sore trouble to me to think it will not be in my time, but it is not far off.’

‘Everything is possible now,’ said Kelly. ‘Heaven knows what’s in store for any of us! Men are talking in a way I never heard before. Boyer told me, two days ago, that the garrison of Paris was to be doubled, and Vincennes placed in a perfect state of defence.’

A bitter laugh from the old chieftain showed how he relished these symptoms of terror.

‘It will be no laughing matter when it comes,’ said Kelly gravely.

‘But who have called here? Tell me their names,’ said O’Sullivan sternly.

‘Not one, not one – stay, I am wrong. The cripple who sells the water-melons at the corner of the Babuino, he has been here; and Giacchino, the strolling actor, comes every morning and says, “Give my duty to his Royal Highness.”’

A muttered curse broke from O’Sullivan, and Kelly went on: ‘It was on Wednesday last he wished to have a mass in the chapel here, and I went to the Quirinal to say so. They should, of course, have sent a cardinal; but who came? – the Vicar of Santa Maria maggiore. I shut the door in his face, and told him that the highest of his masters might have been proud to come in his stead.’

‘They are tired of us all, Kelly,’ sighed the chieftain. ‘I have walked every day of the eight long years I have passed here in the Vatican gardens, and it was only yesterday a guard stopped me to ask if I were noble? – ay, by Heaven, if I were noble! I gulped down my passion and answered, “I am a gentleman in the service of his Royal Highness of England”; and he said, “That may well be, and yet give you no right to enter here.” The old Cardinal Balfi was passing, so I just said to his Eminence, “Give me your arm, for you are my junior by three good years.” Ay, and he did it too, and I passed in; but I’ll go there no more! no more!’ muttered he sadly. ‘Insults are hard to bear when one’s arm is too feeble to resent them.’

Kelly sighed too; and neither spoke for some seconds. ‘What heavy breathings are those I hear?’ cried Kelly suddenly; ‘some one has overheard us.’

‘Have no fear of that,’ replied the other; ‘it is a stout friar, taking his evening nap, on the stone bench yonder.’

Kelly hastened to the spot, and by the struggling gleam of the lamp could just recognise Fra Luke as he lay sleeping, snoring heavily.

‘You know him, then?’ asked O’Sullivan.

‘That do I: he is a countryman of ours, and as honest a soul as lives; but yet I’d just as soon not see him here Fra Luke,’ said he, shaking the sleeper’s shoulder, ‘Fra Luke. By St. Joseph! they must have hard mattresses up there at the convent, or he ‘d not sleep so soundly here.’

The burly friar at last stirred, and shook himself like some great water-dog, and then turning his eyes on Kelly, gradually recalled where he was. ‘Would he see me, Laurence? would he just let me say one word to him?’ muttered he in Kelly’s ear.

‘Impossible, Fra Luke; he is on a bed of sickness. God alone knows if he is ever to rise up from it!’

The Fra bent his head, and for some minutes continued to pray with great fervour, then turning to Kelly, said: * If it’s dying he is, there’s no good in disturbing his last moments; but if he was to get well enough to hear it, Laurence, will you promise to let me have two or three minutes beside his bed? Will you, at least* ask him if he ‘d see Fra Luke? He ‘ll know why himself.’

‘My poor fellow,’ said Kelly kindly, ‘like all the world, you fancy that the things which touch yourself must be nearest to the hearts of others. I don’t want to learn your secret, Luke – Heaven knows I have more than I wish for in my keeping already! – but take my word for it, the Prince has cares enough on his mind without your asking him to hear yours.’

‘Will you give him this, then,’ said the Fra, handing him the bag with the money; ‘there’s a hundred crowns in it just as he gave it to me, Monday was a fortnight. Tell him that – ‘here he stopped and wiped his forehead, in confusion of thought; ‘tell him that it ‘s not wanting any more for – for what he knows; that it’s all over now; not that he’s dead, though – God be praised! – but what am I saying? Oh dear! oh dear! after my swearing never to speak of him!’

‘You are safe with me, Luke, depend on that. Only, as to the money, take my advice, and just keep it. He ‘ll never want to hear more of it. Many a hundred crowns have left this on a worse errand, whatever be its fate.’

‘I wouldn’t, to save my life! I wouldn’t, if it was to keep me from the galleys!’

‘Have your own way, then,’ said Kelly sharply; ‘I must not loiter here’; and so saying, took the bag from the friar’s hand, and moved over toward where O’Sullivan was standing.

‘Come along home with me, friar,’ said O’Sullivan, as Kelly wished them good-night; ‘I’ll give you a glass of Vermouth, and we ‘ll have a talk about the old country.’

CHAPTER X. GABRIEL DE —

‘I wish I knew how I could ever repay you, Pippo, for all your kindness to me,’ said Gerald, as he sat one fine evening with the old man at the door; ‘but when I tell you that I am as poor and as friendless in the world as on that same night when Signor Gabriel found me beside the lake – ’

‘Not a whit poorer or more alone in the world than the rest of us,’ said Pippo good-naturedly. ‘We have all a rough journey before us in life, and the least we can do is to help one another.’

The youth grasped the old man’s hand and pressed it to his heart.

‘Besides,’ continued Pippo, ‘all your gratitude is owing to Signor Gabriel himself. Any little comforts you have had here have been of his procuring. He it was fetched that doctor from Bolseno, and his own hands carried the little jar of honey from St. Stephano.’

‘What a kind heart he has!’ cried Gerald eagerly.

‘Well,’ said Pippo, with a dry, odd smile, ‘that’s not exactly what people say of him; not but he can do a kind thing too, just as he can do anything.’

‘Is he so clever, then?’ asked Gerald curiously.

‘Is he not!’ exclaimed Pippo; ‘where has he not travelled, what has he not seen! And then the books he has written – scores of them, they tell me: he’s always writing still – whole nights through; after which, instead of going to his bed like any one else, he is off for a plunge in the lake there, though I’ve told him over and over, that the water that kills fish can never be healthy for a human being!’

‘What a strange nature his must be! And what brings him here?’

‘That’s his secret, and it would be mine too, if I knew it; for, I promise you, he ‘s not one it’s over safe to talk about.’

‘Where does he come from?’

‘He ‘s French, and that’s all I can tell you.’

‘It can’t be for the chasse he comes here,’ said Gerald musingly. ‘There’s no game in these mountains. It can scarcely be for seclusion, for he’s always rambling away to some village or town near. It’s now more than a week since we have seen him. I wish I could make out who or what he is!’

‘Would you indeed?’ cried a deep voice, as a large, heavy hand fell upon his shoulder; ‘and what would the knowledge benefit you, boy?’ Gerald looked up, and there stood Gabriel. He was dressed in a loose peasant’s frock, and seemed by his mien as if he had come off a long day’s march.

‘Go in, Pippo, and make me a good salad. Grill me that old hen yonder, and I’ll give you a share of a flask of Orvieto that was in the bishop’s cellar last night.’

He threw off his knapsack as he spoke, and removing his hat, wiped his heated forehead, and then turning to the youth at his side, he said: ‘So, boy, I am a sort of mystery to you, it seems – mayhap others share in that same sentiment – at least I have heard as much. But whence this curiosity on your part? You were a stranger to me, and you are so still. What can it signify to either of us what has happened before we met and knew each other? Life is not a river running in one bed, but a series of streams that follow fifty channels – some pure and limpid, some, perchance, turbid and foul enough. What you have been gives no guarantee to what you may be, remember that!’

He spoke with a tone of sternness that made his words sound like reproof, and the youth held down his head abashed.

‘Don’t suppose I am angry with you,’ continued the other, but in the self-same tone as before; ‘nor that I regard this curious desire of yours as ingratitude. You owe me nothing, or next to nothing, and you ‘re a rare instance of such in life, if within the next ten years the wish will not occur to you at least twenty times, that I had left you to die beside the dark shores of Bolseno!’

‘I can well believe it may be so,’ said Gerald with a sigh.

‘Not that this is my own philosophy,’ said the other, in a voice of powerful meaning. ‘I soon made the discovery that life was not a garden, but a hunting-ground, and that the wolves had the best of it! Ay, boy,’ cried he, with a kind of savage exultation, ‘there’s the experience of one whose boast it is to know something of his fellows!’

Gerald was silent, and for some time Gabriel also did not speak. At last, looking steadfastly at the youth, he said: ‘I have been up to Rome these last three days. My errand there was to learn something about you.’

‘About me?’ said Gerald, blushing deeply.

‘Yes. It was a whim – (I am the slave of such caprices) – seized me to learn how you came among the Jesuit brothers, and why you left them.’

‘I thought I had told you why myself,’ said the youth proudly.

‘So you had; but I am one of those who can only build on the foundation their own hands have laid, and so I went myself to learn your history.’

‘And has the journey rewarded your exertions?’ said the boy, half mockingly.

A sudden start, and a look of almost savage ferocity on Gabriel’s features, made Gerald tremble for his own rashness; and then, with a measured voice, he repeated the boy’s words:

‘The journey has rewarded my exertions.’

‘May I venture to ask what you have discovered?’ said Gerald timidly.

‘I went to satisfy my own curiosity, not yours, boy. What I have learned may suffice for the one, and not for the other. Here comes Pippo with pleasanter tidings than all this gossip,’ said he, rising, and entering the house.

‘Won’t you come in and have a bit of supper with us, Gerald?’ asked Pippo kindly.

‘No, I cannot eat,’ said the boy, as he wiped the tears from his eyes.

‘Come and taste a glass of the generous Orvieto, however.’

‘No, Pippo; I could not swallow it,’ said he, in a half-choking voice.

‘Ah!’ muttered the old man with a sigh, ‘Signor Gabriel’s talk rarely makes one relish the meal they wait for,’ and with bent-down head he re-entered the house.

The feeling Gerald had long experienced toward Gabriel was one of fear, almost verging upon terror. There was about the man’s look, his voice, his manner, something that portended danger. Do what he would, the boy never could make his sense of gratitude rise superior to his fear. He tried, over and over again, to think of him only as one who had saved his life, and to whom he owed all the present comforts he enjoyed; but above these thoughts there triumphed a terrible dread of the man, and a strange, mysterious belief that he possessed a sort of control over his destiny.

‘If it were indeed so,’ muttered he to himself, ‘and that his shadow were to be over me through life, I ‘d curse the day he carried me from the shore of the Lagoscuro!’

Night was rapidly closing in, and the dreary landscape was every moment growing sadder and drearier. As the sun sank beneath the hills the heavy exhalations began to well up from the damp earth, till a bluish haze of vapour rested over the plains and even partly up the mountain side. An odour, oppressive and sickening, accompanied this mist, which embarrassed the respiration, and made the senses dull and weary; and yet there sat Gerald, drinking in these noxious influences, careless of his fate, and half triumphing in his own indifference as to life. A drowsy stupor was rapidly gaining on him, when he felt his arm violently shaken, and, looking up, saw Gabriel at his side. In a gruff, rude voice, he chided him for his imprudence, and told him to go in.

‘Isn’t my life, at least, my own?’ said Gerald boldly.

‘That it is not,’ said the other. ‘Your priestly teachers might have told you that you hold it in trust for Him who gave it. I, and men like me, would say that each of us here has his allotted task to do in life; and that he is but a coward, or as bad as a coward, who skulks his share of it. Go in, I say, boy.’

Gerald obeyed without a word; and now a slavish sense of fear came over him, and he felt that this man swayed and controlled him as he pleased.

‘There, Gerald, drink that,’ said Gabriel, filling him out a goblet of red wine. ‘That’s the liquor inspires the pious sentiments of the Bishop of Orvieto. From that generous grape-juice spring his Christian charities and his heavenly precepts. Let us see what miracles it can work upon two such sinful mortals as you and me. Well done, boy; drain off another,’ and he refilled his glass as he spoke.

Old Pippo had retired and left them alone together. The moon was slowly rising beyond the lake, and threw a long yellow stream upon the floor, the only light in the chamber where they sat, thus giving a sort of solemnity to a moment when each felt too deeply sunk in his own thoughts for much conversation.

‘Do you remark how that streak of moonlight seems to separate us, Gerald?’ said Gabriel. ‘A superstitious mind would find food for speculation there, and trace some mysterious meaning – perhaps a warning – from it. Are you superstitious?’

‘I can scarcely say I am not,’ said the boy diffidently.

‘None of us are,’ said the other boldly. ‘If we affect to despise spirits we are just as eager slaves of our own presentiments. What we dignify by the name of reason is just as often a mere prompting of instinct. It amuses us to believe that we steer the bark of our destiny; but the truth comes upon us at last, that the tiller was lashed when the voyage began.’ After a long silence on both sides, Gabriel said: ‘I have told you, Gerald, that I made a journey to Rome on your account. I have been to the Jesuit College; conversed with the superior; saw your cell, your torn school-books, your little table carved over with your pen-knife; and, by a date scratched on a window-pane, was led to discover where you had passed the evening of the fifth of January.’

‘And did you go there also?’ asked Gerald eagerly.

‘Ay, boy. I gave an afternoon to the Altieri and the café in front of it.’

‘You saw the Count, then?’

‘No, I have not seen him,’ said Gabriel dryly. ‘He was away from Rome at a villa, I believe; but I have learned that, indignant at your flight from the Cardinal’s villa, he absolves himself of all further interest in you.’

‘Have you seen Fra Luke?’ asked the boy, who now talked as if the other had known every incident of his life.

‘No; he too was away. In fact, Gerald, there was little to learn, and I came back very nearly as I went. I only know that you are about as much alone in the world as myself. We are meet companions. You said, a while ago, you were curious to know who and what I was. You shall hear. I am of a good Provençal family, originally derived from Italy. We are counts, from a date before the Medici; so much for blood. As to fortune, my grandfather was rich, and my own father enjoyed a reasonable fortune. I was, however, brought up to believe all men my brothers; all interested alike in serving and aiding each other: helping in the cause of that excellent thing we are pleased to call Humanity; and as a creed firmly believing that, bating a chance yielding to temptation, a little backsliding now and then on the score of an evil passion, men and women were wonderfully good, and were on the road to be better. We were most ingenious in our devices to build up this belief. My father wrote books and delivered lectures to prove it. He did more: he squandered all his patrimony in support of his theory, and he trained me up to be – what I am.’ And the last words were uttered in a voice of intense solemnity.

‘I am not going to give you a story of my life,’ said he, after some time; ‘I mean only to let you hear its moral. Till I was eighteen I was taught to believe that men were honest, truthful, brave, and affectionate; and that women were pure-hearted, gentle, forgiving, and trustful. Before I was nineteen I knew men to be scoundrels; it took me about a year more to think worse of the others. Then began my real life. I ceased to be a dupe, and felt a man. I am a quick learner, and I acquired their vices rapidly, all but one, that is still my stumbling-block – hypocrisy. All that I have done,’ said he, in half soliloquy, ‘might have passed harmlessly had I known but how to shroud it. Slander, theft, and seduction must not walk naked in this well-dressed world; but, with fine clothes on, they make very good company. I was curious to see if other lands were the same slaves of conventionalities, and I travelled. I went to Holland and to England; I found both as bad – nay worse – than France. If I obtained a momentary success in life I was certain to be robbed of it by some allegation foreign to the question. My book was clever; but I had deserted my wife. My treatise was admirable; but I had seduced the daughter of my protector. My views were just, right-minded, and true; but I had robbed my father. Thus, with a subtlety the stupidest possess, they were able to detract from my genius by charging it with the defects of my character, as if it behoved one to pay the debts of the other. I went on insisting that it was my opinions alone were before the world; they as steadily persisted in dragging myself there. At last they have had their will, and I wish them joy of the victory.’ There was a savage triumph in his eyes as he spoke this that made Gerald tremble while he looked at him.

‘If you care for my story, boy,’ resumed he, ‘old Pippo there will give it to you for a flask of Monte Pulciano. He ‘ll tell you of all my cruelties in my first campaign in Corsica; how I won my wife by first blasting her reputation; how I left her; how I was imprisoned and fined, and how escaped from both by a seduction. If he forget the name, you may remind him of Sophie De Mounier. They beheaded me in effigy for this at Dole. But why go on with vulgar incidents which have happened to so many! It is the moral of it all I would impress, boy, which is this – take nothing from the world but solid gifts. Laugh at its praises, and drink deep of its indulgences! Those born great are able to do this by prerogative; you and I may succeed to it by skill. Remember, too, that my theory is a wide, a most catholic one; and to follow it you need assume no special discipline, but be priest, soldier, statesman, scholar, just as you will. I have been all these in turn, and may be so again; but whether I wear a cassock or a cuirass, my knowledge of men will guide me to but one mode of dealing with them.’

‘There is nothing in what you have told me of your life to make me revere your principles,’ said Gerald, with a courageous boldness.

‘Because I have told you how I fell, and not how I was tempted; because I have stooped to say of myself that which none dare say to my face; because whatever I have been to the world it was that same world fashioned me to. What would it avail me that I made out a case of undeserving hardships and injustice, proved myself an injured, martyred saint: would your wondering sympathy heal any the least of those wounds that fester here, boy? Every man’s course in life is but one swing of the pendulum. I have vowed that with mine I shall cleave the dense mob and scatter the vile multitude. As to you,’ said he, suddenly turning his glaring eyes upon the youth, ‘you are free to leave this to-morrow. I’ll take care that you are safely restored to those you came from, if you wish to return. If you prefer it, you may remain here for a month or two; by that time I shall return.’

‘Are you going, then, from this?’ asked Gerald.

‘Yes. I am on my trial at Aix, for cruelty and desertion of my wife. They have spread a report that I have no intention to appear; that, having fled France, I mean never to return to it. Ere the week’s over they shall learn their mistake. I shall be there before them; and, if instances from the uses of court and courtiers are admissible, show, that when they prove me guilty, they must be ready to include Versailles in the next prosecution. Watch this case, boy; I’ll send you the newspapers daily. Watch it closely, and you ‘ll see that the file is at work noiselessly now, but still at work on those old fetters that have bound mankind so long. But first say if you desire to stay here.’

Gerald held down his head and muttered a half audible ‘Yes.’

‘To-night, then, I will jot down the names of certain books you ought to read. I shall leave you many others too, and take your choice among them. Read and think, and, if you are able, write too: I care not on what theme, so the thoughts be your own.’

Gerald wished to thank him, but even gratitude could not surmount the dread he felt for him. Gabriel saw the struggle that was engaged in the boy’s heart, and, smiling half sadly, said, ‘To our next meeting, lad!’